Grand Canyon Misty Mountains

I recently was studying how to paint the typical misty mountain painting, as done by many masterful Chinese artists of the past and present. I have to give credit to Henri Li who teaches chinese painting on line, for the inspiration of this painting. He himself, has spent a lot of time painting the southwest of the US, and I share his passion for that part of the country. Henri has created many beautiful paintings of the Grand Canyon, and the desert of Arizona. That area of the world is my favourite place to visit for photography and painting because of the beautiful colour palette that is found there.

Chinese painting is not easy to master, and I am slowly developing my skills. The stages of making a painting involve several steps. Initially, the darks are introduced with black ink, until the brush is exhausted of ink. Then successive layers of gray are laid down by adding water to the brush, each successive layer being lighter than the previous. Colour is introduced in the same manner, from heavier washes down to light washes. One aspect that is hard to master is to be able to visualize the intensity of the colour that results after the paper has dried. The water washes of colour always fade to a lighter tone. The nice thing about that is that successive washes of transparent colour can always be added after the initial washes have dried.

The goal of this painting is to create the effect of a mist in the lower area of the canyon as well as in the far distance. I think I have succeeded in doing that.

Death Valley

This is an image that I took while entering Death Valley from the west entrance, driving back from Lone Pine California. The photo was given a sepia tone colouring, which helps to  portray the feeling I had as I drove down the mountain side into the valley. The temperature was 109 degrees, and I could imagine how the old miners and fortune seekers felt when they were exposed to the searing heat of the sun at 100 feet below sea level, on the salt flats. Death Valley can be a scary place to be in, especially when you are alone, far from any gas station.

I like this image as it draws you in visually from the lower left corner, into the mid distance, where interest is maintained. The flat plateau continues to draw the eye in further, creating a bit of mystery about what's around the bend.

Silver Efex Pro 2

Today I decided to try a demo version of Silver Efex Pro2. I haven't really studied yet how to use it in detail, but a trial image editing of a black and white photo I took in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California has me very interested in this software. First the original image, that I edited in Lightroom:

Then the  image I edited in Silver Efex Pro:

I like this image very much. It's a bit hard to see the image as it looks in Photoshop or Lightroom, since it has to be uploaded as a jpeg, but its quite nice. There are many options as to how one would like the final image to look, and it can be adjusted manually as well. In Lightroom it looks fantastic. I plan to use this software more often in the future.

Zabriski Point, Death Valley

Zabriski Point is a well known viewpoint at the eastern entrance to Death Valley. It is a part of the Amargosa Range in Death Valley, and is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago. This part of DeathValley is noted for its erosional landscape, composed of sediments that were collected at the bottom of the lake in the form of saline muds, gravels from nearby mountains, and ash falls from the then active Black Mountain volcanic field. (Wikipedia: Zabriski Pont) What is striking about Zabriski Point is the colour of the landscape. This image was post processed in Photoshop to create the effect that I was looking for when I actually took the photograph. I de-saturated the blue background and the reddish foreground, which enables the viewer to focus on the yellow band in the middle distance. It becomes the central focus of the image.

Morning at Lipan Point, Grand Canyon

This shot is a good example of waiting for the right moment. I had had arrived at Lipan Point at the Grand Canyon early in the morning, just before sunrise. It was very windy, and some hikers nearby were just preparing to go down into the Canyon on a hike, but they were hesitating due to  possible inclement weather. A dark cloud was behind me, blocking the sun and it looked pretty well like it might be time to pack up. Just as I started walking back to the car, the sky cleared, and bright sunlight broke through. I took a few shots and ended up with a few keepers, one of which I posted here. I always keep in mind some advice I received from a friend of mine, that bad weather can result in good photography. This is especially true at the Grand Canyon, where the weather can change dramatically, and very rapidly.

Sunset Mather Point

Grand Canyon at Mather Point, standing in the middle of at least 100 people, most of them shooting with their I-phones, trying to capture the whole vista on a 2" screen. Of course there are a few shooting with tripod and high end Canons, as there always are at the Canyon. It's a bit uncomfortable trying to muscle your way in for your own shot. I didn't have enough room to use my tripod, but I was able to get a decent shot. No vibration that I could detect in the image. Rangefinders (my Leica M9) are a bit more forgiving as far as shooting in low light at a slow shutter speed, since the rangefinders do not have a mirror like DSLR's, which cause a lot of vibration at slower shutter speeds, say at less than 1/45 seconds. Shooting with a DSLR with this kind of light necessitates using a tripod and usually a cable release. The light level when I took this shot was very low. Using an ISO value of 400, I was able to get this exposure at 1/45 second at f13. However, the bottom 2/3 of the frame was very dark in the raw file. Using Photoshop, and the fact that it was a raw file, I was able to extract the colours in the bottom of the frame. Raw files enable you to extract an amazing amount of information and data that normally would be lost in a jpeg. I made the mistake once in Yellowstone, shooting with my Nikon all in jpeg mode rather than raw. When I started to process the images, I realized my mistake. A lot of images were over or under exposed that I probably could have recovered had I shot them in raw mode. Most of the images that had a broad dynamic range were not recoverable. I guess you learn by making mistakes.

Alabama Hills

This image was taken during a sunrise shoot at the Alabama Hills, in California, near Lone Pine. The Alabama Hills are famous for being the location where many famous old time western movies were made from the 1920's to recently made movies like Star Trek and Ironman. The hills are located directly in front of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and contrast the sharp jagged shapes in the Sierra range with rounded boulder shapes. In this image I de-saturated the grey rocks in the background so that the foreground yellowish rocks would stand out. In fact the whole foreground is in contrast to the background. If the background colour was not de-saturated then it would compete with the nice colourful stones in front. Incidentally, the foreground has also been de-saturated somewhat as well. I see myself doing more of this in my photographs, rather than the opposite, that of increasing the saturation of colours.